


Promises and Threats

by battle_cat



Category: Trust (TV 2018)
Genre: 11 years in this fic which is the same as the actors in real life, Age Difference, Backstory, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, F/M, Infidelity, M/M, Mid-Canon, Polyamory Negotiations, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-11-02
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:54:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27293782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/battle_cat/pseuds/battle_cat
Summary: Leonardo gets the feeling, sometimes, that he is the only person who really sees Primo. Not because Primo is unknowable, but because he is the only person who’s ever bothered to look.
Relationships: Leonardo/Primo Nizzuto, Leonardo/Regina (Trust)
Comments: 74
Kudos: 233





	1. Chapter 1

Primo is thirteen and Leonardo is twenty-four, picking glass out of Primo’s hair at the kitchen table late at night. There’s a dish towel spread over the scrubbed wood, and another one tucked around Primo’s shoulders, red from where Leonardo had wiped the back of his neck. Head wounds always bleed so much.

“You can stay here tonight. If you want to,” Leonardo says, voice low to keep from waking Regina, barely a month his wife, sleeping down the hall. She doesn’t need to see this. Not when neither of them can say a goddamn thing about the way the younger brother of the capo treats his strange, solitary son.

Primo shakes his head, chin resting on his folded arms on top of the towel. “He’ll be looking for me in the morning. It’s worse if I’m not there. I just needed someone to clean it.”

“You know you can always come over, before it gets like this. I won’t tell him you’re here.”

Primo doesn’t respond for a moment. Then, very quietly, he says, “I’m going to kill him.”

From any other thirteen-year-old it would sound like an idle threat. From Primo it sounds like a promise.

“This will sting,” Leonardo says, wetting a handkerchief with disinfectant. “Bite down on something.”

“I don’t need to.”

“Suit yourself.”

He presses the cloth to the gash on the back of Primo’s head. He does bite down, on the meat of his skinny forearm, and he doesn’t make a sound.

Leonardo is twenty-five and Primo is fourteen, hiding behind the church in a borrowed suit at his father’s funeral.

Everyone knows the ridge where his father’s body had been found is a treacherous climb. Especially at this time of year, when the summer-dry earth becomes loose and friable under the baking sun. It’s easy, so easy, for a little skid on loose ground to become a catastrophic tumble into the ravine below, and there are unforgiving rocks at the bottom. Everyone knows someone who knows someone whose cousin had fallen, or almost fallen, that one time. It could have happened to anyone.

Everyone also knows Primo’s father went out hunting alone sometimes, and that he was often a little bit drunk when he did it, as he was in many parts of his life. And that he often did errands for Salvatore in neighboring villages, was not in the business of telling his son where he was going, and was not always home before dark. All in all, it was not suspicious that Primo had waited two days to tell anyone he was missing.

Between the summer sun and the scavenging animals, they did have to make it a closed casket.

Primo is leaning against the church wall in the precious sliver of afternoon shade when Leonardo finds him. He has somehow acquired a cigarette, and is pretending to know how to smoke it, in a way that he doubtless thinks make him look grown-up and intimidating.

Leonardo _tsk_ s at him. “You’re too young for that.” The message is slightly undercut when he lights up his own.

“I’m the man of the house now, aren’t I?” Primo says, all bravado and sharp edges. The swagger fits him about as well as the suit.

“I’m sorry,” Leonardo says. “I thought Salvatore would offer to take you in.”

Primo shrugs, as if it doesn’t affect him at all. “I don’t need anyone to take me in.” He has adjusted his hand slightly to hold his cigarette the same way Leonardo does. “I can hunt. I know how to take care of the animals and the garden. It’ll be exactly the same. Just with no one to beat me.”

He looks up directly at Leonardo, with that stare he has that can unnerve adults three times his age. As if he’s daring Leonardo to ask the question he already knows the answer to, daring him to make Primo say it.

The click of Regina’s sensible funeral heels breaks the moment. “Ah, Primo, there you are. They’re looking for you.” He’s not tall enough, yet, to be a pallbearer, but he can walk beside the coffin with Salvatore, until it’s laid in the sun-cracked earth, next to the mother who hadn’t even lived to see one year of peace after the war ended.

Primo grinds out his cigarette like that’s a thing he does all the time. As he passes, Regina puts a hand on his shoulder.

“You know you’re always welcome for dinner at our house,” she says. “Any time you want.” She reaches out to tuck a lock of hair behind his ear, but he shrugs away from her touch, chin held high as he walks back out into the blazing afternoon sun.

Salvatore is there, putting a somber arm around Primo’s shoulders, as if he hasn’t just decided that leaving a fourteen-year-old kid to fend for himself in a farmhouse on the edge of the village is an acceptable thing for the most powerful person in town to do.

And so, as summer turns to fall and then winter, Leonardo makes sure Primo always has wood for the stove and ammunition for the hunting rifle he is getting terrifyingly good with, and Regina cuts his hair when Salvatore smacks him and says he looks like a girl, and Primo comes to help at lambing season without being asked, and eats seconds of everything Regina cooks on the rare occasions he does come for dinner.

It’s not what any child deserves, but it’s what they can give. What else can you do?

Sometimes, Salvatore sends Leonardo to collect a payment. Leonardo has come to understand that these are the times Salvatore is being nice, and that he has a specific role to play. He’ll show up with a cardigan covering the gun tucked at the small of his back (the cardigan is essential to the whole performance) and patiently explain to some poor fool, look, perhaps you have simply made a mistake; perhaps you are new here and you are confused about how things work; I am just the accountant; I’ve been reviewing the ledgers and some payments are missing; and trust me when I say that you would really rather pay me than the next person who shows up.

He’s good at these jobs. He learned, early on, that he can keep a steady nerve and a cool head, even when things go sideways. It’s only later, when he’s out of the situation, that the shaking starts.

He knows Primo has been doing small jobs for Salvatore for some time now. It’s still a jolt when he goes to visit the new foreman on the motorway expansion project and Primo is there as one half of the muscle accompanying him. Leonardo is twenty-seven, and Primo is sixteen.

Inside the foreman’s trailer, Primo positions himself off to the side, at the edge of the man’s peripheral vision, leaning nonchalantly against a filing cabinet and radiating more silent menace than it should be possible for a teenager to summon. The foreman’s gaze keeps flicking over to Primo as Leonardo reminds him of the unique local tax situation, which surely the foreman’s predecessor had made him aware of and possibly left him an envelope full of cash to deal with. Leonardo stays focused on his goal but a part of him keeps wanting to look over at Primo too; he has figured out how to command all of the attention in a room while doing nothing at all.

Leonardo gets the money. He usually does.

Salvatore invites him over at least once a week now, to the big house behind the gate, ostensibly to discuss financial matters. But really, Leonardo soon realizes, because he wants someone to talk to. His five daughters, and his wife Elena, tough as an old olive tree, are apparently insufficient.

Sometimes, Primo is there. But only if Salvatore has a job to give him. He is seventeen now, grown rangy and tall, his hair perpetually shaggy. Some time around a year ago, he stopped going to school, and Leonardo has heard the village schoolteacher’s private laments about it, down at the local bar, about how _smart_ Primo is, how fast he learns anything he decides he’s interested in, how he could have gone to university, in a different world where everything he was supposed to be hadn’t been decided from birth.

He still lives in the little farmhouse on the edge of town, alone.

It is only by chance that Leonardo is there the day Salvatore’s oldest daughter comes to visit. He had planned to leave hours ago, but there was a fresh batch of goat cheese on which his opinion had been needed, and then there was bread just out of the oven to spread it on, and then there was a bottle of wine being opened, and here we were.

So he’s lingering in the hall by the entryway when Salvatore opens the door, intending to offer some polite greetings and then slip away, and Primo is lingering there too, off to the side, trying so hard to hide the hunger on his face at the flurry of exuberant family greetings. Salvatore is welcoming his daughter in, married a year ago at nineteen to the heir apparent of the most powerful family the next valley over, a man ten years older than her and with two daughters already by his first wife. She has just given birth to Salvatore’s first grandchild. A son.

Salvatore scoops the baby out of his daughter’s arms and coos at him, delighted, and the two little girls tear off into the big house with Elena trailing after them, and his daughter’s husband is helping her out of her winter coat. Salvatore waves a hand at Primo and says, “Come on now, don’t be rude,” and after a second Primo puts the pieces together and ends up with an armful of the guests’ coats.

Elena is back and now she is cooing over the baby, as Salvatore ushers his guests into the house. “Make yourself useful,” he says to Primo. “Hang those up, and then come make us some drinks.”

“No.” Primo is glaring at Salvatore, his jaw clenched. He dumps the pile of coats on the floor. “I’m your _family,_ not your servant.”

Salvatore turns around, and Leonardo is vividly reminded of why he’s feared a dozen villages away in every direction.

He slaps Primo hard enough to make him stumble. Primo is taller than him now, but his shoulders still hunch defensively.

“You’re lucky I let you set foot in this house, you disobedient little shit,” he hisses. “You do as I say, or you get out.”

Salvatore turns his back. Which means Leonardo is the only one in the right position to see Primo’s hand shoot into his pocket and come out holding the little switchblade he’s fond of carrying around.

Leonardo moves without thinking, crossing the space between them and wrapping an arm around Primo’s shoulders from behind, wrenching the hand with the knife behind his back so Salvatore won’t see it. Before Primo can manage more than a confused, reactive struggle, he is wrestling him out the open front door.

He drags Primo, struggling and swearing, around to the side of the house, out of sight of the living room windows. He’s tall but he’s still a skinny kid, and Leonardo can overpower him when it counts. He spins Primo around and slams him against the wall.

“What the _hell_ is wrong with you?” He just barely restrains himself from shaking Primo. “How do you think that would have gone for you, huh? You want to end up in a ditch?”

“It would have been worth it,” Primo snarls, features twisted with rage. “I hate him!”

“What’s new?” Leonardo yells. Fear is making him vicious, but if that’s what will get through to Primo, he doesn’t care. “Deal with it! You can be a sullen teenager around him, or you can live to be an adult! Which do you want?”

“Fuck you! Get the fuck off me!” Primo struggles ineffectively for a second, and then he plants one shoulder against the wall and shoves, and it turns out when he’s angry he is just strong enough to flip them around, so Leonardo is against the wall instead, and he has just enough time to think _I didn’t disarm him,_ and then the lethal edge of Primo’s switchblade is under his jaw.

He freezes, because that’s all he can think to do, and Primo freezes too, and Leonardo gets a moment to look straight into the bottomless well of rage that Primo usually keeps under the surface.

“Primo.”

He doesn’t even dare take a deep breath. That knife is _sharp;_ he knows Primo keeps it sharp, and all he has to do is press in, just a little, in the right spot. He knows Primo knows how to do it. It’s no different than slaughtering a lamb.

“Primo, stop. Put it down. You don’t want this. It’s okay. Just take a breath. Put the knife down.” He’s barely registering what he’s saying, just keeping his voice low and steady and praying it works.

Primo’s hand on the knife shakes, and Leonardo’s voice dries up in his throat. Primo is breathing hard, every muscle in his body taut with barely-contained fury, and for a minute nothing happens. Then he moves the knife a trembling hand’s width away from Leonardo’s throat.

He grabs Primo’s wrist and twists the knife out of his hand as fast as he can.

Abruptly, Primo seems to collapse inward. He releases the handful of Leonardo’s jacket he has in his fist and sags back against the wall, his face in his hands, looking like he might be sick.

God, Leonardo wants nothing more than to pull this broken, wounded kid into his arms and hold him tight. But he thinks if he tries to touch Primo right now he’ll bolt. And it’s vitally, vitally important that he learn the right lesson from this. Leonardo feels like someone’s life might depend on it.

“What did you learn about yourself just now?” 

Primo drags a hand through his hair, looking stricken. “That I would have killed you.”

“No.” He holds up a hand, and he’s distantly impressed to find it’s only shaking slightly. “You learned that you can stop. You can stop yourself, when it matters. Remember that.”

He folds the knife closed and holds it out to Primo. For a moment Primo just stares at him, like this must be a trick or a trap somehow. His hand darts out to snatch the knife back.

“Remember,” he says one more time.

He makes it around the corner of the house, out of Primo’s line of sight, before he has to stop and puke in the bushes, bracing his hands on the cold stone until the world stops spinning.

Two days later, Primo is gone.

The treasured grandchild dies. Drowned. A tragic accident involving a curious toddler and a cistern and the briefest lapse in attention. Salvatore mourns. His second daughter is married off to the scion of another prominent family. There are rumors almost immediately that her husband is sleeping with another girl in the village, a girl even younger than Salvatore’s daughter, but no one can ever prove anything. The marriage has yet to produce a child.

Leonardo hears that Primo is living in Rome. He has cousins there, it seems. Every once in a while, a useful tidbit of information will make its way back to Salvatore. A politician who has certain well-hidden vices which leave him susceptible to blackmail. A vulnerability a rival crime family would rather keep hidden. Leonardo, privately, thinks Salvatore is vastly underestimating the value of someone as smart and stealthy as Primo being his eyes and ears in the capitol. But no one asks his opinion about these things.

Regina gets pregnant and miscarries four times in a row. When she finds out she is with child a fifth time she sobs and sobs. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t do it again,” she wails into Leonardo’s shoulder as he holds her, sitting on the bed and trying not to feel broken in two.

“If you really don’t want to…we can find a way to take care of it,” he says, his cheek pressed into the soft cloud of her hair. He knows there are ways, old wives’ tales about certain plants that will do the trick.

She looks up at him, her eyes red and swollen. “You would do that for me?”

He brushes a tear off her cheek with his thumb. Regina, who has put up with midnight errands for Salvatore and learning the best way to get blood out of his clothes and practicing over and over what to do if there is someone in the house, until she could reach right in front of the shotgun barrel with a steady hand to open the bedroom door for him silently. His brilliant, brave and clever wife, who had looked everything he was in the eye and said she wanted him anyway.

Yes. He would do it if she asked.

“If that’s what you want.”

She shifts a little so she can rest her forehead against his, her hand on the back of his neck. “You want a child so much,” she whispers.

He does. He wants it terribly. If only because he wants a chance to give his son or daughter something _better._ To teach them to hope for more than a few sheep and a correspondence course that taught him just enough to launder money. There are many things in life he hasn’t the skill for, but this one… He thinks he could do it right.

It fills him with rage, sometimes, that there are people who have children right in front of them and cannot love them.

“Not at the cost of you,” he says, and it’s true.

She takes a shuddering breath. “I need to think about it.”

They sleep curled tightly around each other. In the morning her face is still puffy, but she says, “One more try. Then I’m done.”

Leonardo is thirty-two, getting exuberantly drunk at his youngest sister’s wedding reception, the meadow where he grazes the sheep in the winter ringed with streamers and filled with the loud joy of his extended family. Gia is radiant in her frothy white dress, but Regina is the one all the aunties are cooing over, beaming as she bounces their infant son in her arms. Little Francesco stares up at the party lights strung in the trees and grins, utterly unaware that he is charming everyone. Leonardo is more tired than he has ever been in his life—it turns out babies are exhausting, even with Regina’s mother there to help—but he is so, so happy.

At some point, when the party is just getting good, Regina finds him among the plethora of second cousins from over on the other side of the mountain. “I’m dead on my feet, love,” she says. “I’m going home. You stay as long as you like. I don’t mind.” She gives him a brief kiss, leaning in carefully so as not to wake Francesco.

Some time and quite a few glasses of wine later, a figure on the edge of the crowd catches his eye. It takes him a minute to recognize that it’s Primo.

He cannot be any taller at twenty-one than he was at seventeen, but the way he moves and carries himself after four years out from under his uncle’s shadow is transformed. He looks relaxed and confident, hands in his pockets as he makes polite small talk with one of Leonardo’s great-aunts. He’s wearing a pale gray suit—not an expensive suit, but _perfectly_ tailored—and a wine-red tie, his hair longer than Salvatore would have ever let him have it, brushing the hinge of his jaw.

He looks up and catches Leonardo’s gaze, as if he already knew he would find it, and he smiles. The real smile, not the shark-smile he uses when he’s trying to scare someone.

They end up behind the barn, away from the noise of the rest of the party. Primo takes something out of his breast pocket that Leonardo thinks is a hand-rolled cigarette, but when he lights it it’s clear it’s marijuana.

He takes a drag, holding the smoke in for a long moment before letting it drift in lazy curls out of his mouth. He holds out the joint with a raised eyebrow.

“Why not?” Leonardo says. He feels, suddenly, like a brazen teenager again, sneaking up into the hills after Sunday mass to smoke and pass around a stolen bottle of Pietro’s father’s horrid-tasting homebrew.

“It seems like Rome suits you.” He passes the joint back to Primo.

“I like it there.” Primo is leaning against the barn, one foot tucked up against the weathered boards. “No one knows me.”

“I think I would get lonely.”

Primo shakes his head. “It’s perfect,” he says, the glow of the joint just catching the edges of his features. “I can do things there that I could never do here. People would know.” He looks up when he passes the joint back to Leonardo, assessing him on some unknown metric, with that gaze he has that goes right into you, like a blade so sharp you don’t even feel it, at first.

Leonardo smokes, and he says nothing, and he waits for Primo to say whatever it is he’s deciding whether or not to say. He passes the joint and Primo takes a hit, then another.

“I let a guy fuck me. At a party,” Primo says, expelling smoke in a long plume. He’s not looking at Leonardo, but Leonardo can tell he is waiting. To be told he’s disgusting, or that he’s going to hell for that, or that he’ll bring dishonor on the family. Leonardo knows what Primo looks like when he’s waiting for a slap.

“How was it for you?” he says, as casually as he can.

Something spasms briefly across Primo’s face. “I liked it.” His voice is very quiet. “It hurt. But I liked it.”

“It’s not supposed to hurt.” He has no idea why _that_ is what comes out of his mouth, of all things. Except…who the hell else is going to tell Primo these things if he doesn’t? “Tell him to use his fingers first next time. And something other than spit for lube.”

The corner of Primo’s mouth twitches up. “Are you an expert on these sort of things, mister accountant?”

He plucks the joint from where it’s burning unattended between Primo’s fingers and smokes the last stub of it before grinding it out on the gravel beside the barn. “What do you know about what I was getting up to when you were still too young to grow pubes?”

Primo’s face splits into a grin and he _laughs,_ tipping his head back against the barn wall. Leonardo can count on one hand the number of times he has heard Primo laugh like that, with genuine delight. The laughter dies as abruptly as it started and then Primo is _looking_ at him, with that intense focus that unnerves so many people, and there’s something alight in his eyes, something wild and hungry and terribly, terribly vulnerable.

Primo moves, sudden and fluid, and then he is right there in his space, trapping him against the barn wall with his hands on either side of Leonardo’s shoulders, barely a whisper of air between their bodies. He’s close enough that Leonardo can smell the wine on his breath, the aftershave he used; close enough that the tips of their noses would be brushing if Primo hadn’t tilted his head ever so slightly to the side.

“What _were_ you getting up to?” he breathes.

He can’t answer. He can’t breathe. Primo is so close to him, and he’s drowning under the sudden, mortifying knowledge that _he wants him to be._ Primo’s blade against his throat would be less terrifying.

Primo leans in, and God help him, Leonardo _lets_ him, lets their mouths get agonizingly close before he manages to turn his face away. “Primo—”

Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Primo’s jaw clench. He feels balanced on a knife’s edge, once again scrambling for the right thing, the _one_ right thing to say that won’t crush the fragile trust between them, the trust that, he is reasonably certain, Primo has extended to no one else on Earth.

He settles on: “I’m married.” He is very aware that he has not said _I don’t do that_ or _I don’t want to._

Primo has not retreated at all; he can see every tendon in his throat as he swallows. “Go home, then. To your wife. No one’s stopping you.” He’s still got his hands braced on the wall on either side of Leonardo’s shoulders.

He puts a hand on Primo’s chest and nudges a tiny bit of space between them. Gently. He can feel Primo’s heart pounding. Then, without warning, some invisible thread of tension snaps and Primo backs away from him, just as suddenly as he cornered him.

He searches Primo’s face, bracing for hurt and rejection there. But instead Primo has a smile on his face, the shark-smile, as if he’s just uncovered the greatest secret in the history of mankind. 

As if he knows, with total certainty, that he only has to wait.

Primo is around the village more often after that, although he still spends the majority of his time in Rome. Maybe he has talked his way back into Salvatore’s favor, although Leonardo thinks it’s more likely Salvatore has just finally found a use for him.

Primo becomes the person Salvatore sends when he has stopped being nice. He is very effective. He quickly develops a reputation, and he seems to enjoy stoking it. He settles into the power of knowing how to make people afraid of him like a second skin. He learns. How looking relaxed can make you the scariest person in the room. How a stare and an unhinged grin can do more than a gun sometimes. He has always had a kind of unsettling intensity about him, even as a child, and now he hones it into something predatory.

There turn out to be lots of people who find that compelling. He has the eye of plenty of the young girls in town—the ones who like him despite his scariness and the ones who think they like him because of it, because they don’t understand, what a short journey it would be for Primo to become someone like his father. 

It’s probably for the best that he has no interest in any of them.

The scariness is not what Leonardo finds compelling. He’s seen men put on that act for his entire life, and Primo may be good at it, but it’s nothing new. No—the things he can’t stop looking at are all the bits of Primo that contradict that façade. The way his controlled demeanor will sometimes slip to let a little bit of boyish eagerness peek out. The way Primo’s face can change, in the rare moments when he thinks no one is looking at him, to something thoughtful and a bit melancholy. The way he’s let the fringe of his hair grow out almost to his eyebrows, and how soft it looks when he bows his head to light a cigarette, and how desperately Leonardo wants to run his fingers through it, if he didn’t think it would get them broken.

Leonardo is becoming aware that he may be in trouble here.

It’s not the first time he’s felt…urges…toward men. There had been some dalliances in his teenage years, the kind of silly things boys dared each other to do out of curiosity about the forbidden. And one or two encounters that were not so silly. He’d just assumed it was something that would go away when he got married to the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen, who after ten years can still take his breath away just as easily as she did on their wedding night. And up until now, he’d been right.

The worst part, the _very_ worst part, is that Primo knows. There are only so many times you can sneak a look at someone as sharp-eyed as Primo before he catches you at it. And in his great wisdom and maturity, Primo chooses to respond by being completely insufferable. He finds every opportunity he can to tease Leonardo, finding small ways to get in his personal space, poking him with little insults until he snaps and responds, making endless old-man jokes when he starts going gray at thirty-five. (“That’s what happens when you have a child, Primo. Someday it might happen to you,” he says, to which Primo just laughs.) And God help him if the two of them are with Salvatore together; for some reason Primo relishes provoking him then more than in any other circumstance. It is utterly infuriating, and it fucking _works,_ and Primo knows it.

In his calmer moments, he realizes that this is a kind of affection from Primo, maybe the only kind he knows how to show. And he thinks about the fact that, as far as he can see, Primo treats no one else like this, and there is a certain degree of trust involved. And he can’t say that doesn’t make him feel…something.

In his less calm moments, he wants to haul off and smack the smug grin off Primo’s face.

He never does, though.

He doesn’t know what would have happened if things had played out differently. Maybe he and Primo would have kept circling each other until the end of their lives. Maybe Primo would have given up and accepted a wife, for appearances’ sake, although as far as Leonardo is concerned no woman deserves that fate. Maybe his control would have snapped at some point and he would have kissed Primo the way he’d wanted to behind the barn at his sister’s wedding.

What actually happens is the business with the Getty boy.


	2. Chapter 2

He’s in the kitchen of a farmhouse on a hill outside some village he doesn’t know the name of. He’s lost track, some time in the past thirty hours or so, of exactly where they are.

“Come here. That’s it. That’s right,” he is saying to the boy he has just eased Primo away from shooting in the face. He is using the same soft voice he used to talk to Primo, and praying it works a second time. He tugs the kid up from his seat as gently as he can, pulling him away from the table where the blood is starting to drip off the edges. The boy is too in shock to resist; lets Leonardo pull him over to a quiet corner of the kitchen without a struggle.

He’s not wearing _shoes_ for some reason, and he leaves bloody footprints. Leonardo has seen his picture in the paper, but up close he looks so desperately young. _Jesus, he’s just a child,_ Leonardo thinks. His face is absolutely covered with blood and gore.

There’s a dishtowel on the counter. He holds it out for the kid to take (Paul, his name is Paul, the same as his father and grandfather) but Paul just stares at it blankly.

“Here. It’s okay.” He unfolds the towel and does his best to wipe the blood off his face, not making any sudden movements, trying not to let it drip into his eyes. He keeps one hand firmly on Paul’s wrist, just in case he tries to bolt, but Paul doesn’t move.

The two guys from the village who were not far behind them are in the kitchen now. “Put the traitor in the trunk,” Primo is saying. “Leave the other one.” It’s a pity about the old man, Leonardo thinks, but if Primo was going to kill someone he would much rather it not be the one person Primo had been told not to. He hopes that anyone else in the house is smart enough to stay out of sight until they’re gone.

Paul’s gaze has drifted back over to the table. “Hey. No. Look at me.” Leonardo puts a hand on his gore-streaked chin and turns his face when he doesn’t seem to hear him. No reason the kid needs to watch them try to move a body with half its head blown off.

“I told him we were going to New York,” Paul says in barely more than a whisper.

Leonardo sighs. Of course that had been enough to charm a kid who hadn’t yet had the hope of something better crushed out of him. “That was very stupid,” he says.

Primo gets his attention with a quiet “Oi.” He tosses him a length of rope he must have had stashed in his jacket somewhere. Paul doesn’t resist as Leonardo ties his hands. At this point he’s just hoping the shock lasts long enough to get Paul into the car with the man who just splattered him with someone else’s brains.

It’s not until he eases Paul into the back seat and he and Primo are inside with the doors locked that he lets himself breathe out a sigh of relief. He searches for his cigarettes. Now his hands are shaking, and he fumbles with the lighter.

Primo is there, leaning a little into Leonardo’s space with his own lighter ready. His hands are rock steady, but in the gray morning light the bags under his eyes are very visible.

He lights his own cigarette. “I told you I would find him,” he says quietly. He rakes a hand through his hair, looking, abruptly, like a man who hasn’t slept since the night before last. Leonardo had at least dozed off a few times in the car when they were driving from village to village. Primo hadn’t stopped once.

“Do you need me to drive?”

“Fuck you,” Primo says, starting the car. He manages to make it sound almost affectionate.

“Don’t drive us off a cliff, then.”

They can’t talk about the fact that Leonardo most likely just saved Primo’s life as well as Paul’s, that Leonardo had attached himself to Primo’s search party because he knew he might need to do exactly that, and that, on some level, Primo knows both of these things. So they do this instead.

In the back seat, Paul sinks down, curling up into a fetal position. He still has blood in his hair.

“Tell him to sit up,” Primo mutters as they start down the steep, narrow dirt road from the farmhouse. The car drives like a car that has a dead body in the trunk.

“He’s fine.”

“I want him where I can see him.”

“I can see him fine in the mirror. Just drive.”

They’re fucked. They are _fucked,_ he thinks, sweating his way up a mountain in his best suit. Because there is no way Salvatore won’t find out that they don’t have the ransom, and there is also no way they can tell him the truth right now, in front of everybody.

So now, everybody he loves is in danger because some _rich fucks_ can’t be bothered to pay an amount of money they won’t even miss.

 _We have to think,_ Primo had said, and he’d made it sound like a demand, because that’s what Primo does. He hides requests under demands and affection under insults and fear under threats. Someone who didn’t know Primo as well as he did would not have been able to see that this was Primo asking for help.

Underneath the stone cold terror about the impossible situation they are walking into, he can’t help but feel a rush of fierce, possessive affection. Because Primo is clearly _furious_ —Leonardo can _feel_ the rage coming off him in waves like radiant heat. But he had still managed to stop himself from putting a bullet in Paul’s head the way Leonardo is sure he had wanted to. ( _I knew you could do it,_ he thinks.) And when he’d realized he was out of moves and didn’t know what to do, Leonardo was the one he had come to. And Leonardo already knows, without having to think about it, that he is not about to let Primo down now.

“Fuck,” he mutters once they make it down the mountain again. “We’re already late. If Salvatore doesn’t kill us, Regina will be next in line.” The joke lands flat and fragile in the tense air of the car.

Primo takes a bump of coke from the little silver vial he always has with him. Leonardo vaguely wonders if he’s been up all night yet again.

He starts the car. “I have to go back to my flat first.”

“What?”

“You think I’m going to church dressed like this?” he scoffs. “You need to clean up, too. You look like you’ve been climbing a mountain.”

“No—since when do you have a flat?” The farmhouse that Primo’s father had owned has been abandoned on the edge of town for years, the animals long since given away to neighbors who could care for them. Leonardo is shocked to realize he has never once thought about where Primo stays when he’s here. Although he supposes he at least needs somewhere to store his clothes.

Primo shrugs. “Had it for ages.”

“Where?”

“Above Saverio’s,” he says with a twitch of a smile. Primo would think it funny, to live above a butcher shop.

He still has that crooked half-smile. “What? You think I’ve been sleeping in my car all this time? I have standards.”

As they head back into town, Leonardo is still trying to process the fact that Primo has, for years and without his notice, had a living space within sight of his own home.

He’s been sleeping like shit, ever since they sent the bloody _ear_ to Paul’s family. So it’s not hard for the persistent _tap tap tap_ of small rocks hitting the bedroom window to wake him up.

“If you break my window I will fucking kill you,” he hisses at Primo, leaning against his car in the darkened street with a clutch of pebbles in his hand.

“Put on some clothes and get down here,” Primo says, and there’s something in his voice that makes Leonardo do it without question.

Regina sits up as he’s getting dressed. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Business with Primo. I’ll be fine.” He takes the small revolver from the drawer in the bedside table, just in case.

Primo is silent and tense as they drive way too fast down the narrow road to the next village, his jaw clenched.

“Do you plan on telling me where we’re going?” Leonardo asks finally.

“To get a real fucking doctor. That idiot vet doesn’t know what he’s doing.” Primo’s finger taps restlessly on the steering wheel.

Of course he would never admit to having the same clawing fear that Leonardo does: that Paul is only getting worse; that whatever they’re doing isn’t helping; that they still haven’t heard anything from his family; that he’s going to die before they make the exchange. Of course Primo would say that this is only about the fact that it’s considerably harder to ransom a dead body. But Leonardo is sure that, deep down in some place he would deny the existence of, Primo doesn’t want Paul to die. Not now. Not like this.

They pound on the doctor’s front door until he opens it in a bathrobe. To his credit, he takes one look at the two of them standing in the doorway and says, “I’ll get my bag.”

When they finally get the money, Primo walks away from Salvatore’s embrace and goes over to Paul, in his huddle of blankets in the back of the cave. Paul is well enough now to sit up, at least, and Primo bends down so he can look him in the eye.

“They always pay in the end.” He says it in English. Like it’s important to him that Paul know that he had done what he said he was going to do. Like he’d promised him. Maybe he had.

It’s not until the morning after the drop-off, when there’s a picture of Paul on the front page of the paper, alive and—well, alive at least, that he’s finally able to breathe sigh of relief.

He spends the evening at Salvatore’s, discussing how they are going to launder hundreds of millions of lire, enough to overwhelm every front business in Calabria several times over. It’s Salvatore and Leonardo and a handful of men Leonardo knows by name but hardly ever interacts with, important men from other branches of the family. He thinks one of them is the husband of Salvatore’s middle daughter, but it’s hard to keep track. Primo is not there.

The money is spread out on a dark wood table in a windowless interior room that gets cloudier with smoke as the evening goes on. Stacks and stacks and stacks of it, so many times more money than any of them have ever seen in their lives.

At some point in the conversation about the absurd problem of having _too much money,_ he stops paying attention to whatever Salvatore is saying.

 _Primo did this,_ he thinks. _Primo did this through sheer fucking force of will, and you can’t even_ see _it._

He gets the feeling, sometimes, that he is the only person who really sees Primo. Not because Primo is unknowable, but because he is the only person who’s ever bothered to look.

He excuses himself at the earliest reasonable hour possible, saying he needs to get home to Regina and Francesco. He does not go home.

The storefront of Saverio’s has looked the same for as long as he can remember, only the prices changing with time. Saverio himself is long since retired; the shop is run by his son now, who lives in the house next door. The second floor above the store is just big enough for a little flat, which Leonardo vaguely remembers being occupied by Saverio’s widowed mother-in-law at one point.

It takes him a minute to find the exterior stairs, hidden behind a gate in the alley beside the shop, perfect for someone who wants to come and go without being seen from the main road.

Primo opens the door. His gaze scans Leonardo’s face once, and it’s like he knows. Still, he stands in the doorway, waiting for him to ask.

“Invite me in,” Leonardo says, his mouth suddenly dry.

“Come in.” The corner of Primo’s mouth twitches up in the barest ghost of a smile.

He steps back, but only just enough for Leonardo to cross the threshold and shut the door behind him. Which is probably for the best, because it means Leonardo can step right into his space, before he loses his nerve, back him up against the wall and kiss him.

He wishes he could say that Primo tastes like something pleasant, but his mouth tastes exactly as you’d expect, like cigarettes and cocaine and the whiskey he must have been drinking. He tastes like fumbling around in the bathroom of a shitty club, and it’s unbearably hot. He can tell Primo is sort of trying to…direct the operation, to take control, to impress him, but he keeps slipping up; he is too eager, too hungry, too easily overwhelmed; chasing after his mouth every time he pulls even a millimeter away. It’s…God, it’s terribly endearing, really. He puts a firm hand on Primo’s jaw, trying to say without words, _relax, it’s okay, let me._ And Primo does relax a little, almost unconsciously, letting him set the pace, letting him bite at his bottom lip, letting him put a hand in his hair as long as it’s something closer to grabbing than stroking. It is utterly intoxicating.

When he pulls back for a momentary breath of air, Primo looks like he’s on the verge of laughing. “What’s so funny?”

“I knew it,” Primo gasps. “I knew the money would do it for you.”

“It’s not the money. You idiot.” He smothers whatever retort Primo had with a kiss.

He presses him harder against the wall, letting himself get lost in kissing and touching, all the ways he’d wanted to touch and couldn’t, his hands on Primo’s waist and his hips and his ass. They are grinding against each other like horny teenagers now, Primo rocking up against him, and he is getting hard faster than he thought was possible at his age. All of a sudden Primo flips them around, so he’s the one with his back against the wall, and deft fingers are unbuckling his belt and tugging down his trousers, and almost before he can process what’s happening, Primo is dropping to his knees and taking his cock into his mouth.

It is immediately obvious that Primo _very much_ knows what he is doing in this department.

“ _Fuck,_ ” he hisses, fingers digging at the wall, and he thinks he hears Primo make a small self-satisfied noise.

It’s almost too much too fast, and he feels himself hurtling toward the edge way sooner than he expected. He grabs a handful of Primo’s hair and pulls him back. Primo looks up at him, from his knees, a little rope of spittle trailing from the tip of Leonardo’s cock to his lips. He looks _obscene,_ and he looks like he knows it.

“Get on the bed.” He still has a fistful of Primo’s hair, and Primo does not seem to object to that at all. “I want to fuck you.”

Primo grins.

It’s somewhat of a blur how they both get all their clothes off. There is definitely a moment where he pushes Primo down on his back and pins him there, and Primo makes a little breathless noise before he can stop himself.

“I think you like it when I push you around a little,” he says, arranging himself to straddle Primo’s hips. As if any of this would be happening if Primo didn’t want it.

“I think you like remembering that you have it in you,” Primo shoots back. He bites his mouth for that.

Primo has a little pot of petroleum jelly in the bedside table drawer, which makes Leonardo wonder exactly how long he’s been thinking about this. He stops caring about it at the noise Primo makes when he pushes the tip of a slick finger inside him.

It might have been easier to do this in some other position, but he can’t resist the chance to see Primo’s face, the arch of his neck and the way his eyes flutter closed as he works his fingers inside him. Primo reaches down to stroke himself and he pushes his hand away. “Not yet,” he says. “I want you to come when I’m inside you.” Primo gives a little overwhelmed laugh that he’s going to remember for a long time.

When he finally pushes inside him, Primo makes a sound like all the breath is being driven out of him. God, he’s incredible to behold, flushed and disheveled and gasping. “Too fast?” He still can’t help stopping to check.

“If you don’t move right now I will _fucking_ kill you,” Primo grits out, and so he does, slowly, and gets an actual moan out of Primo when he pushes back in. Which really just makes him want to find out what other sounds he can get Primo to make. Everything is so intense and hot and close, Primo’s legs wrapped around his waist and his hair a mess across his face as he fucks him in slow, steady thrusts, and he kind of can’t believe that Primo will let _anyone_ see him like this, so undone and overwhelmed, mouth open and head thrown back when he comes. That Primo will let _him_ see him like this fills him with something like awe.

Afterward, when they’ve collapsed next to each other, sweaty and panting on the bed, he can’t resist stroking a gentle thumb along the line of Primo’s cheekbone.

Instantly, Primo turns away. “Don’t you have a wife to get home to?”

He curses himself for thinking that one tender touch wouldn’t curdle the moment into something Primo couldn’t stand.

“Can I take a shower here?”

Primo shrugs, going about the business of lighting a cigarette so he has something to do. “No one’s stopping you.”

Leonardo climbs out of bed. He hasn’t paid attention to anything in the flat, really, but as he heads for the bathroom he notices the newspaper on the kitchen table, the same one he’d looked at this morning, with Paul’s picture on the front.

In the shower the guilt hits him. He wonders if Regina will take one look at him and just know; if even if he scrubs off every trace of Primo’s touch and scent and fluids, she will see it anyway.

Maybe he’ll get lucky and she’ll be asleep when he gets home. He had told her not to wait up.

When he comes back into the bedroom to start retrieving his clothes, Primo is lounging stretched out on the bed, smoking. Still nude, his hair a mess, a provocation.

“Salvatore has your share, when you want to come get it,” he says, because he can’t think of anything else to break the silence. And then, because he can’t stop himself: “You did good. Even if he never tells you that.”

“Fuck you,” Primo says.

“Maybe next time.”

“Next time?” Primo barks out a laugh. “You think you were that good, huh?”

Which is how Leonardo knows Primo desperately wants there to be a next time.

“Look. Look at this.” Primo’s flat has grown dark around them as they’ve talked late into the night, a few days after Primo broke into Leonardo’s house with a still-warm gun and a business plan. Inside the circle of golden light and cigarette smoke over the kitchen table, the air feels charged with potential.

The table is covered with maps, maps Primo has taught himself to read. He extracts one from the pile and lays it out on top.

“These are the shipping lanes.” His finger traces a graceful line through the paper Mediterranean on the table, sweeping from Suez to Gibraltar. “And look, right here in the middle.” He taps a spot on the coast. “Gioia Tauro. A natural deep-water harbor, completely unexploited.”

“There is a port there already.” Leonardo has been there once or twice, seen the weathered fishermen bringing in their catches.

“A little port. Fishing boats.” Primo waves his hand dismissively. “But the water here is deep enough for container ships. Think about it. Why go to Malta when you can unload your cargo right here, on the mainland? All it needs is someone who can grease a few palms, get a few government contracts to develop it.”

Primo lets his finger trail off the western edge of the map. “And you know what’s over there?” he asks, pointing at the far wall of the kitchen.

“Your kitchen sink?”

“Colombia.”

“Colombia?”

“Why fuck around with bringing coke in by the suitcase through the airport when we could be bringing it in by the shipping container, direct from the source?”

Primo’s face is alight, his eyes dancing with barely-contained glee. He can look so young when he’s excited about something. “I haven’t shown you the best part,” he says. He shuffles through the paper on the table and pulls out another map. Leonardo thinks he vaguely recognizes the curve of Gioia Tauro’s harbor under the technical schematics.

“This is the railroad into Gioia Tauro. They’re building it for the steelworks, but they’re not going to finish the steelworks.”

“What makes you think that?”

“The whole market’s flooded with American steel. They’re making it faster than the world can use it. It’s all going to crash in the next couple of years.” He says it with a casual wave of the hand holding his cigarette, leaving Leonardo staring. “Anyway, that’s not the important part.” He traces a line on the map. “The railroad ends here. A kilometer and a half from the edge of the port.”

“Okay, so we extend it. A kilometer and a half—that’s nothing. We can make that happen.”

“No, no, you’re not seeing it.” He has that barely-contained smile on his face again, and his delight at his own cleverness would be obnoxious if it weren’t so genuine. “What do you do with a shipping container if you can’t move it right from the ship to a train?” He looks at Leonardo, and he’s not quite sure if he’s supposed to answer, but Primo’s excitement gets the better of him anyway. “You have to put it on a truck. You have to put it on one of _our_ trucks. We’ll control _everything._ The legitimate business and the smuggling. Nothing moves unless we say so.”

Primo has a kind of mad triumph in his eyes, and Leonardo wonders, not for the first time, exactly how long he has had this plan. How long it had taken him to line up all the pieces to set it into motion.

Of course Primo would have seen the potential of a place everyone else had dismissed and overlooked, a place no one else had thought to pay attention to. Of course he would understand what could be built, and that it would only happen if they did it themselves. The same way he had understood, at thirteen, that a father who beat the shit out of him wasn’t a problem anyone was going to solve for him, and if he wanted to live to adulthood he was going to have to solve it himself. Because he understood, maybe better than most, a fundamental truth of their lives: that no one ever gives people like them anything. If you wanted something better for yourself, for your children, you had to take it.

Leonardo looks at the pile of maps, the brazen ambition laid out on a small kitchen table in a flat above a butcher shop. “It’s a lot of money, coming and going through a place like that.”

“Millions,” Primo says.

“You’re lucky you have a good accountant.”

Primo grins.

They move to Gioia Tauro shortly after construction begins on the port. It is easier to keep an eye on everything, and there is a better school for Francesco, a school where some of the kids will go to university.

Leonardo and Regina and Francesco have a very nice flat in the center of town. Primo has a house tucked high up in the hills overlooking the harbor. It’s a modest house, nothing that would draw any particular attention, but the forbiddingly steep approach makes it highly defensible.

They still go back to the village most Sundays. They’ll go to church and then eat lunch at the little restaurant in the main square, recently opened with money from a new development scheme that had unerringly found its way into particular pockets. They’ll sit at the corner booth that is always kept open for them no matter how busy the place gets, eat dishes that are not on the menu and drink the expensive wine.

Once every few weeks or so, at random, Primo will call the owner over for a quiet word and a wave of his hand around the place, and every table’s check will be paid. (“You can’t do it all the time,” he explains to Francesco, who is listening with rapt adoration. “Then people will come to expect it. They’ll start feeling like it’s something they’re owed. Just every once in a while, to remind them you can.”)

After lunch Regina will go visiting and Francesco will run off to spend a few hours with his village friends, and Primo and Leonardo will go to the bar. Primo will continue to order the good stuff, but he’ll drink it slowly, never enough to get drunk beyond the limits of self-control. And it’s known in the village that you don’t approach Primo about business at lunch and definitely not at church, but if you have a problem you cannot solve, you may bring it to his attention at the bar, and he may offer a solution, if you are willing to accept the price. Primo does this because he understands the value of being owed. But also, because he knows the value of being someone who can solve a problem when no one else can; because he knows you cannot keep people’s loyalty by fear alone. Not forever.

They have a telephone in their bedroom now. Only one person ever calls at this hour.

“Get dressed. I’ll be outside.” There is something _off_ about Primo’s voice, something unsettled and tense, and it makes Leonardo’s stomach clench.

“Business with Primo,” he says, when Regina rolls over as he’s getting dressed. “Don’t worry.”

In the car, Primo’s jaw is clenched tight. They drive to the port in silence. The night guard waves them through the gate to the waterfront.

The one conspicuous luxury Primo has allowed himself since moving to Gioia Tauro is a little speedboat, currently docked in an out-of-the way corner of the harbor, tucked behind the main construction area where the infrastructure for the container terminal is being built. It’s pitch black except for the safety lights along the edge of the pier, casting everything in dim orange and deep shadow.

Leonardo waits until they park at the dock and get out of the car to ask, “Are you going to tell me what this is about?”

In answer, Primo opens the trunk. He takes a flashlight out of his jacket pocket and shines it on the body inside, wrapped in heavy black plastic. 

“Isn’t this the kind of thing you have people for now?” Leonardo says.

“Not this one.” He pulls back a corner of the plastic, revealing the dead man’s face, or what’s left of it.

“Jesus _fuck,_ Primo.” For one of the few times in his life, Leonardo feels like he might be sick in the presence of a dead body, although it’s not the bits of brain and skull stuck to the plastic that are doing it. “That’s Giuseppe Piromalli’s son.”

Primo nods. “Decided to have a go at me outside the office. Unfortunately for him, he missed.”

“Are you out of your goddamn _mind?_ You’re getting us into a war!” He can see it, everything they worked so hard to build going up in flames, the fragile future where you didn’t _always_ have to solve your problems with a bullet in the head, because you had money and the ability to make powerful people listen to you, the way rich people did.

Primo shakes his head. “War’s already started. I’m making sure we stay out of it.”

“And how do you figure that?”

“We dump him. Out there, where the current runs south.” Primo points to a spot near the edge of the harbor. Leonardo has never paid attention to how the current runs there, but he has no doubt Primo has. “And we don’t say shit about it. If he does wash up, it’ll be in De Stefano territory.”

“So you’re not going to retaliate?”

“Oh, I am.” The corner of Primo’s mouth twitches up. “But not the way they expect. We’re going to let them kill each other, and while they’re not paying attention we’re going to take over their territory. All of it.”

On the edge of the harsh white glow of the flashlight, his smile is perfectly calm, and cold, and calculating.

Sometimes, even Leonardo still underestimates him.

“Now help me get him on the boat,” Primo says, wrapping the plastic back up. “Motherfucker is heavy.”

It’s not until they heave the body, and the cinderblocks it’s attached to, into the dark, gently rolling water that Leonardo notices the blood dripping off Primo’s hand.

“You did get hit.”

“It’s a graze,” Primo says, without having to look for where the blood is coming from.

“You should still clean it.”

He has only been in Primo’s house a handful of times. It’s a strange mix of stark utilitarianism and halting flashes of Primo’s sharp eye for style. There is nothing on the plain whitewashed walls, not even a crucifix, but the living room has a shag carpet and furniture that looks straight out of a decorating magazine for rich, modern-thinking housewives. It also has a rifle permanently stationed in the corner near the window with the widest field of view, the one that can become a sniper’s post at a moment’s notice. The few personal touches—the stack of second-hand books by the bed, the fresh eggs in a blue and white ceramic bowl on the kitchen counter, the single sunflower in a vase on the coffee table—feel furtive and uncertain, a secret he has divulged only with extreme reluctance.

In the small, scrupulously neat bathroom, Primo takes off his shirt. That is not strictly necessary for examining the shallow groove the bullet scored in his upper arm, but Leonardo’s not about to object. Primo was right; it’s just a graze, but unattended-to while hauling a dead body around, it has bled down his arm to his fingertips.

“Here,” Leonardo says. “Let me.” He wets a hand towel in the sink and scrubs the half-dried blood off Primo’s arm. He can’t help sneaking glances at Primo in the mirror over the sink, necklaces draped over his bare, pale chest, lowered gaze making his dark eyelashes stand out as he watches Leonardo wipe blood off the lean muscle of his forearm.

Primo has a fully-stocked first aid kit under the sink. Of course he does. He is nothing if not prepared for the eventuality that there will be no one else to take care of him.

Leonardo unwraps one of the little disinfecting wipes. “You want something to bite down on?”

Primo’s mouth twitches. “Do it for me.”

He swabs the wound clean, and he bites down on the meat of Primo’s shoulder. Primo’s eyes flutter closed.

After he wipes away the fresh blood that oozes out, and wraps the wound in a neat gauze bandage, they go into the bedroom with no discussion needed.

He presses Primo down, on the white sheets that always feel crisp and freshly laundered, and takes him into his mouth. It is usually the other way around, but tonight he wants the control of having only Primo to focus on. He still pins his hips down firmly when he arches and squirms, and holds him back from the edge until he swears a blue streak, because the only way Primo will accept care and attention is when it’s hidden in teasing and roughness.

After Primo comes, he slides up next to him on the bed and kisses him hard, Primo licking the bitter-salt taste from his mouth. It takes only a few deft strokes of Primo’s hand to finish him off.

They lie facing each other on the bed, catching their breath, and he can’t resist smoothing the sweaty hair away from Primo’s face. He starts to pull away, as Leonardo knew he would, but this time he stops him with a gentle hand on his shoulder.

“Don’t,” he breathes. “Just this once. Let me.” 

He kisses his forehead, his cheek, the bridge of his nose, brushes the curtain of his hair gently behind his ear. Primo doesn’t move. But he doesn’t pull away either.

He pulls Primo into his arms, tucking his face into the hollow of his neck, his chin resting against the top of Primo’s head. It takes Primo a long moment to drape an arm around him, and another long moment to actually relax into it, but eventually he can.

He does it for as long as he thinks Primo can stand.

When he comes home, very late, Regina is sitting in the kitchen in her bathrobe. She is smoking a cigarette, which is never good news.

“You were with Primo,” she says, when he walks into the kitchen to see why the light is still on.

“I told you. Business.” Why is his mouth suddenly so dry?

She gives him a little smile that he can’t quite read. “I don’t mean like that.”

For the second time that night, his guts feel like they’ve just turned to lead. And he can see, from the second he doesn’t immediately deny it, that there’s no point in lying.

“How long now?” She’s looking at him calmly, not crying or yelling, and that’s somehow so much worse.

“Since around the time of the thing with the Getty boy.”

She nods, as if this doesn’t surprise her.

“How did you know?”

“Leo.” She shakes her head. “We’ve been married for twenty years. I know what you look like after a good fuck.”

He would laugh, if he didn’t feel like throwing up.

“Do you want me to stop seeing him?” He has no idea if that’s even possible, if Primo would allow it to happen, and what damage it would cause if he tried. But if Regina asked, he would.

“Do you want to stop seeing him?” she asks.

That’s not the response he expected. “I love you.” It’s all he can think to say.

“I know you do. That’s why you’re in this kitchen and not out on the street right now.”

He deserves that, he supposes.

She nods to the chair opposite her. “Why don’t you sit down?”

He sits. He doesn’t know what else to do.

Regina taps the ash off the end of her cigarette and asks, matter-of-factly: “Do I not satisfy you?”

“No, no, love, you have to know that’s not it.” He wants suddenly, desperately, to touch her. The best he can do is reaching across the table for her hand. She lets him fold it in both of his own and doesn’t pull away. “I will always want you.” They don’t burn with the passion of newlyweds anymore, the early days when they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. But what do newlyweds know of a lover you’ve known half your life, of being able to read each other with a look, of knowing exactly how to touch someone, and the thrill when you can still surprise them?

“Always?” she asks with a raised eyebrow. “Even when I’m old and gray and my teeth fall out?”

“Especially then.” She smiles, and for a second the world tips back into alignment, everything between them still there.

“But,” she says. “You want him, too. You want both of us.”

It’s a small mercy, he supposes, that she had not said _You love both of us,_ and forced him to answer that question. “Yes,” he says.

“All right, then.”

“What?” She cannot possibly be suggesting what he thinks she’s suggesting.

“Why not? I hear people make all sorts of modern arrangements these days.”

“I… You would do that?”

“You think I’m the first married woman in history who knew her husband had a lover?” She takes a drag on her cigarette. “I love you. And I know you love me. I know everything you’ve done for this family. For us to have something better. I have built our life around bigger obstacles than this.”

He has to swallow twice around the lump in his throat before he can speak. He has no idea what he ever did to deserve her. “You’re not angry?” he finally manages.

“Oh, I was, in the beginning. I’ve had time to get used to the idea.” He wonders, again, if she had known from the very first night. “It’s not so surprising, really. He’s had a crush on you since he was a kid.”

_“What?”_

“Oh, come on, Leo. Have you ever known a teenage boy to be that interested in sheep? He was desperate to spend time with you.” She grinds the cigarette out in the ashtray, and then says, with total sincerity, “I think you’re good for him.”

Out of all the directions this conversation could go, he had never considered that Regina would concern herself with Primo’s feelings.

“You won’t hurt him. And you won’t let him push you around.” She shakes her head. “Who the hell else is he ever going to find?”

Leonardo is laughing, and he finally identifies the emotion bubbling to the surface as relief. He pulls her hand toward him across the kitchen table and kisses it, and then he pulls her to her feet and into his arms (so willing and easy and familiar, so unlike Primo), and then he kisses her. And if she can taste anything of Primo still in his mouth, it doesn’t make her hesitate.

He pulls back enough to cup her face in his hands. God, he loves her so much. “If there is anything you want from me, anything at all, just say the word and I’ll do it.”

“There is one thing,” she says. “I want you to tell Primo that I know.” She steps back a little so she can look him in the eye. “I want him to know that you do this with my permission. And that if I should ever ask him for something, he should think very hard before he says no.”

He laughs. He doesn’t know how else to react. “I can’t say that to him. Regina, I can’t say that to him!” This works because he knows the rules. They may be… _lovers;_ he has never thought of it like that but he supposes that it correct; but Primo is still his _boss,_ and he is able to keep the balance because he understands where the boundaries are.

Regina smiles. “I’m sure you’ll find a way.”

When he does, eventually, tell Primo, it’s in bed after they’ve fucked. He figures the chances are about fifty-fifty of him having to run for his life without having time to grab his clothes. But he honestly can’t think of a better option.

Primo is dead silent for a minute, and then he bursts out laughing. He laughs and laughs and laughs. “That woman has more balls than the rest of us combined.”

“Should I tell her something for you?” Leonardo says when Primo has settled down into occasional chuckling.

“Tell her I’m coming to dinner,” Primo says. “This Saturday. Make something nice.”

Primo shows up on Saturday with a very expensive bottle of brandy. Regina cooks lamb so tender it’s falling off the bone. The pasta course is orecchiette. Leonardo fervently hopes Primo appreciates the joke.

Primo asks Francesco about what he’s learning in school and seems to listen with genuine engagement while Francesco talks about the excursion they’d gone on, where the history teacher had identified all the Roman ruins scattered around the city. The old bits of stone that to Leonardo have always been just part of the landscape are fascinating to Francesco—what they were, how they were built, who lived in them. He goes on about the seawall in Naples, how it’s been there for two thousand years, how engineers still don’t know how ancient people built something that could last that long underwater.

“Next time I go there, I’ll take you along and you can show me,” Primo says, and Francesco beams.

Eventually Francesco is sent reluctantly off to bed, and it’s just the three adults at the table. Regina clears the last of the dishes and Leonardo gets glasses for the brandy and Primo pours. But before they can drink Primo holds up a hand.

“Regina,” he says. “I hear you want to make a deal.”

Leonardo could not say what changes about Primo. His posture remains completely relaxed. Maybe it’s only something in his eyes. But suddenly, he is a coiled threat sitting at their table.

Leonardo stiffens, wondering if tonight is going to be the night he has to defend his wife against his lover.

Regina stares Primo down with the calm of a woman who has spent her entire life holding her own among violent men. “Is that how you see it? A transaction?”

Primo shrugs. “I’m listening. Ask or don’t ask.”

Regina nods. “Francesco,” she says. “Leonardo wants him to be able to leave this place. And I know you want him to stay.”

“What of it?”

Regina leans forward, ever so slightly. Primo doesn’t move. “Let him choose,” she says. “When he is old enough, let him decide for himself. If he wants to go to university, leave this life behind and never look back, let him go. And if he wants to stay—”

Leonardo doesn’t even realize he’s leaned forward until Regina’s arm is across his chest. She doesn’t take her eyes off Primo.

“If he wants to stay, you teach him what he needs to know, and you protect him with your life. With your _life,_ Primo. I am not burying my son. Do you understand?”

For a moment Primo says nothing, and the air in the room feels like a spark will set it alight. “You think you can make demands of me?” His voice is very calm, and very quiet, and Leonardo doesn’t think he has ever been more afraid of him.

“I can’t make you do anything, Primo,” Regina says. “And my husband is not something to be bargained over. I’m saying, if you want to do this right, like a real family, this is how. Give Francesco something better than you two ever had. Give him a choice.”

For a moment Primo stares across the table at her, and Regina stares right back, and nobody breathes. Then Primo says, simply, “Deal.”

The tension in the room snaps like a lightning strike going off. Primo leans forward, completely relaxed again, the predatory stillness gone. “Now we can drink,” he says, raising his glass. Regina picks up hers, and after a moment Leonardo does the same, as if his wife and his lover hadn’t just joined forces to take five years off his life.

Of course Primo would use the same toast he did when they first broke ground on the port. “To the future,” he says, and drinks.

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hi on [Tumblr!](http://fuckyeahisawthat.tumblr.com)


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